Milking It - Frank McNally on the ups and downs of diary farming

An indirect effect of this column’s online rebranding a while ago is that I have since been alerted to one of the more common typos in agri-journalism. I refer to the tendency, when writers mean “dairy”, to print “diary” instead. As a result, whenever I Google the term “Irish Diary” now, results can be alarming.

After the election of a new British prime minister last month, for example, when it was reported that she might trigger Article 16 of the Northern Ireland protocol, someone on Twitter warned that this would have serious implications for the “Irish Diary industry”.

Meanwhile, and more reassuringly (I think), RTÉ’s news website announced that “almost half of Irish Diary exports now go to destinations outside the UK and the EU”.

But earlier this summer, even the estimable Tony Connelly was tweeting from Brussels that a new regulatory scheme being considered by the UK would “put a question mark over the circulation of NI diary products in the Republic”. Bad news there, apparently, for our occasional writers from Belfast and Derry.

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The confusion is not confined to Ireland. On the contrary, news from abroad can be even more worrying. For reasons obscure, vegans in Britain and the US hate columns like this. Hence a recent headline: “Why the diary industry is much more cruel than you think.”

Then there was the American health website claiming that while “diary products” are a good source of calcium, they are also in many diets the main contributor of “saturated fats”, and thereby linked to “heart disease, type 2 diabetes, Alzheimers”.

On top of all that, of course, the diary sector is blamed as a major cause of climate change. Scurrilously, primary producers in the chain are said to emit vast amounts of methane into the atmosphere, although some of us have never even been tested.

A happier side effect of noticing the typo everywhere is that I have of late come to think of myself as a diary farmer. The jobs have more in common than you might thing. Hours are broadly similar, for one thing, comprising the entire waking day.

I too must milk daily, after a fashion: herding ideas – often underfed – every morning and squeezing them for all they’re worth before releasing them back into the fields, or sometimes out on to the “long acre”, in the hopes they will fill the quota again tomorrow.

In one way, diary farmers have it worse than dairy ones. Robot milking, for example, is not yet an option in our industry. And unlike dairy farmers, we have to do all the grazing ourselves too.

Fodder shortages are a regular occurrence, despite the mountains of books, magazines, and newspaper cuttings with which we fill our working (and living) spaces. You can never have enough. Which is why I agree up to a point with those dyslexic vegans. The diary industry can indeed be cruel, if only to diarists.

Readers (not to mention my late father, an actual dairy farmer) might think it rich to compare the privilege of writing a daily column with that, or indeed with real work of any kind.

But I would remind them that the sainted Seamus Heaney did something very similar. Remembering his forefathers digging turf, he likened it to the scratching of his pen on paper and the excavation of ideas for poetry.

Not that I expect a Nobel Prize for such insights as the dairy/diary parallel. Still, just in case, let me also mention here another Nobel laureate who comes up a lot when you Google “Irish Diary”.

I refer to the German writer Heinrich Böll, who won the prize in 1972. There is no typo involved in his case, because “Irish Diary” is one translation of the title of a famous book he wrote about his time in Ireland during the 1950s.

But given the extent of the dairy/diary confusion, I am both pleased and amused to find a Böll among the cows, and hope his presence will improve the milk yield eventually.

In the meantime, on behalf of the National Diary Council, I want to reassure consumers that, except for a few involving overseas flights, Irish Diary products are not to blame for melting the ice caps.

Nor do diary products cause heart disease, diabetes, or any other known health condition. Some users may experience mild irritation from time to time, it’s true. But taken in moderation, preferably with breakfast, a daily diary can help prolong your life, or at least make it feel that way.